1 The Perugian University’s Reforms and Natural Law

At the universities of the Papal States, the teaching of natural law had a more recent history than at other Italian studia, the subject being particularly controversial. This was mainly due to the ecclesiastical authorities’ mistrust of the Protestant natural law schools, whose theories circulated across Europe. Thus, the Perugian case not only reflects the long and bitter struggle that conservative Catholicism put up against Enlightenment and modern culture, but it also highlights the reformers’ choices in pursuing interesting intellectual avenues and combinations closely tied up with the political developments of the period. Natural law theory in Perugia wound up representing the symbolic site of every modernizing trend, and for this reason the subject always drew from conservatives the suspicion of acting as a seedbed of more or less revolutionary and liberal sentiments.¹

In fact, the first formal course on natural law (Diritto naturale) was made possible only by the proclamation of the Roman Republic in 1798. At that time the course was introduced as part of the general university reform plan envisioned by a highly respected professor at the medical school, Annibale Mariotti. For a long time, Mariotti had been an intellectual lodestar for the progressive learned class adhering to the Jacobin Republic. Mariotti had travelled and spent a formative period in Rome under the papacy of Benedict XIV, as well as in Bologna, and particularly in Parma, where he came into contact with the duchy’s francizing culture.² It was not accidental, then, that he should have kept the essential texts of the Enlightenment philosophers in his library.³ On the basis of Mariotti’s university reform plan, the interior minister in Rome, Antonio Franceschi, approved the establishment of the natural law course at the Perugian law school, citing these grounds:

What this pedagogical function of natural law recalls is not a form of Jacobin radicalism but, rather, an eighteenth-century reformist spirit, like that of Antonio Genovesi. In fact, in 1767, in requesting minister Bernardo Tanucci to authorize the establishment of the course on natural law in Naples, Genovesi pointed out both the utility of the chair in training administrative personnel and the fact that the course ‘would serve to teach youths the science of duties insofar as these are founded on the law and on the law of nations [ius delle genti]’.⁵ Genovesi’s influence on Perugian culture is also attested by the quotations from his works by later professors. It is necessary to clarify ‘later’, because with the fall of the Roman Republic, the natural law course established in March 1799 was abolished as soon as August of the same year, and its first professor, Bernardino Mezzanotte, a man of letters, left no record of his teaching. The same thing happened with the courses on public law, constitutional law, civil law and criminal law, which in 1800 were likewise brought to a stop.⁶ As for Annibale Mariotti, he was imprisoned and died in 1801.

Before moving on with this reconstruction of the tortuous succession of natural law courses from the Roman Republic to the Revolution of 1848, we should consider that the intellectual climate of the Umbrian province at the end of the eighteenth century was anything but static. The curial faction – first serving an anti-Enlightenment and anti-Jansenist function, and then an anti-revolutionary one – had its standard bearers precisely in Umbria: the printers Ottavio Sgariglia and Giovanni Tomassini, of Assisi and Foligno, specialized in publishing anti-modern literature.⁷ The attack on Protestant natural law schools, too, had been underway for some time, becoming intertwined with the polemic against the Enlightenment. In Perugia, in 1789, the publisher Carlo Baduel received a commission from an unnamed ‘prelate, who is outstanding by virtue of his birth, intellect, doctrine, and study, and who sits sovereignly on one of the most august Tribunals of the world in virtue of his practice and for the glory of the true laws’.⁸ Under this commission, Baduel published a critical history of natural law theory – from Grotius to Vattel and Burlamaqui – extracted from Appiano Buonafede’s Della restaurazione di ogni filosofia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII (On the restoration of every philosophy), with its well-known antimodern verve.⁹ This suggests – albeit ambiguously – that natural law was a topic of debate, and the circulation of natural law texts both in their Latin editions and in their French and Italian translations is evidenced by the library holdings in Umbria.

One may speculate, too, that resistance to the introduction of natural law teaching also came from the Perugian law school. A historian of the University of Perugia, Giuseppe Ermini, has assessed that by the end of the eighteenth century the law school had gone into a deep decline under a conservative stranglehold. The Perugian law school was indeed still proud of the lineage it could trace from Bartolus de Saxoferrato and was unwilling to open itself to modern European law schools.¹⁰ After all, the studium was still based on the rules set forth in the 1625 papal brief of Urban VIII. By this act, the pope had formed an alliance between the Curia and the Perugian oligarchy through the episcopal control over the studium; moreover, the brief stated that all lecturers were required to be citizens of Perugia with a doctoral degree awarded by the same university, thereby ensuring a local hereditary succession for all chairs. Indeed, none of the attempts at reform by archbishops Marsili and De Buoi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had proved successful.¹¹ With the first Restoration, under the imperial regency (1799–1800), a ‘Plan to reopen the University of Perugia’ was drawn up. This plan could have preserved at least some of the Jacobin reforms, if Cardinal Consalvi had not intervened with a negative opinion. At that point, only a regime change could liberalize the system.

And indeed, the second opportunity to introduce the teaching of natural law came with the return of the French and the new Napoleonic regime. In the period from 1809 to 1811 a university reform plan was again drawn up, this time mainly thanks to the role of the Roman Barnabite Giuseppe Colizzi. In 1799, Colizzi had been summoned to Perugia by the republican government to teach a course entitled ‘Analisi dell’intendimento umano’ (Analysis of human understanding), a title that leaves no doubt as to its derivation from Lockean sensualism. Colizzi was a scientist and had already gained a wide reputation for his studies in chemistry and for having been a versatile professor of philosophy, theology, mathematics and physics at several Barnabite schools.¹² Then, in 1810, the departmental government recalled Colizzi – recommending him to the Consulta straordinaria degli Stati Romani¹³ as university inspector – and assigned the office of university rector to Giuseppe Antinori, another professor who had supported to the Roman Republic. Colizzi and Antinori were then entrusted not only with administrative and financial responsibilities, but also with the task of designing a new reform plan, formally completed only in 1812.¹⁴ Meanwhile, two new courses were launched for the 1811/1812 academic year: Italian literature, assigned to Antinori, and chemistry, to Colizzi, who was also appointed for the course on natural law, now renamed ‘Diritto naturale e sociale’ (Natural and social law). Then, in 1812, the official course ‘Natural and social law’ was assigned to the jurist and humanist Pietro Antonio Magalotti, a patrician from Terni,¹⁵ who had earned his law degree at the Sapienza University of Rome and had been recommended for this position by the imperial vice prefect of Perugia, Giovanni Spada (himself a member of Terni’s nobility). Colizzi succeeded Magalotti from 1816 to 1825, that is, until the course was once more suppressed, now under the papal bull Quod divina sapientia of Leo XII (1824). Not accidentally, the new pope’s anti-reformist policy applied to that course, which had always been suspected of being a medium for liberal ideas. In reality, the papacy’s concern was about the student unrest in the pontifical area of Emilia and Romagna, a movement that would also express itself openly in Perugia in the upheavals of 1831.

The course on the law of nature and nations would not be reintroduced until 1847. At that time the course was entrusted to Colizzi’s pupil Emilio Barbanera, who would teach it until 1851. But this long hiatus should not be regarded as a total eclipse of natural law theory, since Colizzi continued to have a relevant political and intellectual role, in his capacity both as president of the Perugian Collegio Pio della Sapienza and as a scholar. After retirement, he worked for ten years on his six-volume work Saggio analitico di giurisprudenza naturale e sociale (Analytical essay on natural and social jurisprudence).¹⁶

2 Recovering the European Intellectual Debate of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

We thus have two main figures as teachers of natural law, Magalotti and Colizzi, neither of whom was a citizen of Perugia or held a doctoral degree from its university. Both had supported to the Roman Republic, and later to the imperial government, and both were involved in the project to modernize the university. Political developments pushed them to collaborate with the regime of the period and to maintain the uneasy balance between the necessity to update the university programmes and to respect orthodoxy. But even in the activity of teaching there gave rise to the difficulty of choosing texts and reference points, which were subject to control by the local inquisitor and the Roman Congregation of Studia.

In the intellectual development of the first formally appointed professor, Magalotti, it bears underscoring that he was trained at the Roman law school, and that he most likely was in touch with the circles of the Catholic Aufklärung.¹⁷ His first work had been an erudite book on the history of Terni in Roman antiquity.¹⁸ But in 1806–1807 he published his own translation of Grotius’s De veritate religionis christianae. This Italian translation (printed in Foligno by the episcopal publisher Tomassini) was undertaken because nothing of that kind existed, apart from a series of Latin editions dating to the eighteenth century. Magalotti’s choice to translate this text reveals his long practice in exploring Grotius’s thought, and a specific interest in the first two books of De veritate (the only ones with a translator’s commentary). Magalotti’s presentation is for the most part a defence of Grotius against the charge of Socinianism that had been advanced by a string of critical commentators from Bossuet to Faure, Balthus, Houtteville and Valsecchi. However, as Maurizio Bazzoli has shown, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Catholic attitude toward Grotius took a positive turn, also with an anti-Pufendorfian function.¹⁹ Still, in Grotius’s De veritate the apologists saw a text whose consensus gentium and theological rationalism could hide the germ of natural religion, and the idea that moral principles and natural law could be accessed by ‘right reason’, as these were imprinted into human nature directly by God. The translator’s commentary seems to move in this direction when, from the very beginning, he recalls Rousseau’s Émile to confirm the Grotian view on God as the creator of every regularity in the universe, and of natural society and civil society, both based on human reason.

A few years after translating Grotius, as we saw, Magalotti was teaching the course ‘Natural and social law’ at the University of Perugia. From the manuscripts held by municipal libraries of Terni and Perugia²⁰ we can understand how much his approach depended on Grotius. Magalotti’s ‘Brief preliminary speech on the principles of the Law of Nature and of Nations’ opens with the statement that ‘Natural Law is nothing but the collection of Laws which right reason demonstrates to be consonant with human nature. These Laws are laid down by the Author of Nature himself. Hence, Natural Law could also be properly called the Code of God, the Code of the Author of Nature’. Grotius, ‘that sublime genius’, as Magalotti goes on to comment, was certainly the modern author who wrote about natural law more extensively and elegantly than anyone else. Natural law must be the foundation of all legislation: this law is universal and is binding not only on citizens but on all men, kings, peoples, and nations. It is perpetual and immutable, for it descends from nature and ‘from its wisest Author’. Natural law doctrines ‘are the worthiest for Man and the Citizen’, and without them there would be no notion of what is fair and honest. This science ‘holds within itself the principles of Morality, Jurisprudence, and Politics’.²¹

Grotius was thus Magalotti’s main reference point, but the above presentation is based directly upon the Principes du droit de la nature et de gens by the Genevan jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui.²² Burlamaqui’s Principes, which Magalotti used as a sort of textbook, was a model of synthesis that did not separate the beloved Grotian natural law from Pufendorfian utilitarianism, thus enabling Magalotti to tread the middle path, which was suitable for the time. Another quality of Burlamaqui’s work consists in its being primarily a philosophy of law. And so, apart from the mandatory preamble on the divine origin of natural law, in reality, both Burlamaqui and Magalotti founded natural law on right reason. And on this subject, both of Pufendorf’s works, De jure and De officio, were extensively mentioned, being available in the French translation – enriched with a long ‘Préface’ – by Barbeyrac, who was also quoted on several occasions (on which Almici’s Italian translation of the De jure was also based).²³

Magalotti was very familiar with Italian Catholic natural law scholars, such as Finetti, Lascaris and Lampredi, but also very clear is the influence exerted on him by Genovesi. The Neapolitan philosopher and economist held that, by nature, man is first and foremost a moral being, and principles – i.e., the original trait that distinguishes humans from animals – are the condition for the establishment of human societies. Natural law is essentially firm and immutable, just like the laws and forces that govern the earth, which ‘in their essence never vary’. Even more clearly, Genovesi stated that the ‘World’s physical laws are the foundation of Moral laws’: ‘from this it follows that the law of nature is always felt by all men, in every time, every place, every state, and across all the differences that education introduces among men’.²⁴

At this late stage, after a long history of different phases and political-philosophical controversies about natural law, the newly appointed professors of the Perugian studium resorted to those authors who favoured the traditional identity between morality, law and politics – an identity that could still secure the firmness and universality of natural law.²⁵ However, the rationalism informing Magalotti’s course was bound to face the theological question of the primacy of revelation and Church over the rational foundation of moral principles, albeit of divine origin. This is the point where the rationalist current of Catholic natural law theory established a compromise: revelation was to be considered the confirmation of the principles inscribed ab origine into human nature, as was evidenced by the fact that such principles essentially coincided with Christianity. In the end, though, it cannot be ascribed to Grotius, who, in the prolegomena of his De jure, distinguishes natural law from evangelical ethics, the latter being morally much more exacting.²⁶

The part of the course devoted to the practical and political import of natural law principles is quite limited. Prudence would make this advisable to anyone preparing to teach for two years under the Napoleonic regime and then two more under the pontifical regime. Without taking up the political problem of the best historical forms of government, Magalotti argued that good government rests on legislation containing both the moral principle – essential to law – and the utilitarian principle of the common happiness.²⁷ Magalotti’s tendency was to bring together – without critical scrutiny – all the most convincing theses on the state of nature and the origins of society, so long as they converged towards universalism and ethical rationalism. This suggests that he belonged to the generic scuola giusnaturalistica, as Norberto Bobbio called the modern natural law school once it survived into the Restoration period, even if its ambition to explain the actual nature of society and the state in philosophical terms had been exhausted.²⁸

Magalotti’s approach was primarily philosophical, but since natural law theory was considered so generic and comprehensive, in 1814 the professor was entrusted with the course ‘Diritto di commercio’ (Commercial law), which he then published under the title Principj politico-filosofico-legali del diritto di commercio (Politico-philosophico-legal principles of commercial law, 1819).²⁹ By reading this work, we can understand – right from the premise – that Magalotti’s main sources on civil society, besides Grotius, were Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, Montesquieu and Heineccius. But he also drew on Hobbes, Locke and Le Clerc. In treating on commerce, he essentially relied on Jean-François Melon and on the ‘exceptionally clear Genovesi’, referring to his Diceosina and Lezioni di commercio. But then he also used the French translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Ultimately, the connection between this course and the course on natural law lies in Magalotti’s attribution to manufacture and commerce of the decisive role for founding and enabling civil society to pursue its aim, that is, the pubblica felicità.³⁰

By the 1810s, mentioning natural law and quoting from the classics of modern natural law theory seem to have passed the threshold for trust. In fact, these classics made their way into other courses held at the University of Perugia, and this practice was even considered an indispensable update. In the manuscript of Silvestro Bruschi’s ‘Prolegomena’ to his course ‘Istituzioni criminali’ (First principles of criminal law), introduced in 1812, the professor dealt with the same problem that was concerning his colleagues in their teaching of natural law – that of ensuring ‘unity, certainty, and perpetuity’ for the moral rule.³¹ Bruschi’s argument essentially followed the same line of reasoning; because the pursuit of one’s own happiness has its correlative in the happiness of others, it follows that men are obliged by nature to cooperate with one another. In reality, when man introspects, he recognizes that ‘a universal principle, indubitable and speaking to each man’s heart, can only be found in desiring the good, toward which we are all inclined and destined by nature’. Thus, the search for the good (understood as the moral good) stands before man as an obligatory precept, that is, it stands as law.³² Ultimately, Bruschi was interested in demonstrating the truth of the fundamental tenet, common to all the anti-voluntaristic natural lawyers, that ‘only the power of reasoning (with which all men are endowed) can make clear to each person what the true norm of free actions is, by teaching us to distinguish the true good from the false’.³³ God has written all this into human nature; thus it responds to the finalism of creative omnipotence.

3 From Natural Law to Political Science: A Metaphysical Principle for a Realistic Investigation of Civil Society

The courses established under the 1810 reform, which Ermini has observed to have been wisely kept in place after the 1814 Restoration,³⁴ served clearly as a sort of seminar for modernization. The teaching of natural and social law – since its beginning a symbol of this new trend – retained the original function of providing the best arena for applying universal reason to civil society, as this kind of exercise remained at once philosophical and theological. Nevertheless, this teaching also offered many useful analytical tools for all sectors of the civil societies. In this regard, the abbot Colizzi was an important interpreter; he succeeded Magalotti in the chair, now renamed ‘Diritto naturale ed economia pubblica’ (Natural law and public economics), from 1816 to 1825. Although Colizzi has been largely neglected by historians, he pioneered a very interesting path, owing not only to the sources he used, but also to his gradual transition from metaphysics to political science. In comparison with Magalotti, Colizzi embraced a more ambitious philosophical strategy and a different gnoseology, referring to a Catholic anti-Enlightenment philosopher. These conceptual tools initiated a novel natural law development in the nineteenth century. It was elaborated by a professor with remarkable knowledge not only of philosophy, but also of political science and economics.

Colizzi’s courses are very well documented. Indeed, we have the manuscript of the 1824 course, compiled by a student;³⁵ and, even more importantly, we have the six-volume edition of his previous courses – much expanded and reworked for publication under the title Saggio analitico di giurisprudenza naturale e sociale (1833–1836).³⁶ The first part of the manuscript course – corresponding to the first volume of the published Analytical essay on natural and social jurisprudence – contains the core elements of Colizzi’s philosophy, which we can summarize in these terms: natural law is ‘eternal and invariable’.³⁷ Its horizon is not convenience, but the truth. ‘Metaphysical truth’ leads to ‘moral truth’. The model of metaphysical truth is geometric and mathematical truth. Immutability, universality and mathematical certainty ‘pertain to the order of essential relations among things’.³⁸ These relations hold for both numerical series and moral rules, and serve to define what is beautiful, honest, just and decorous.³⁹

What we can observe here is a mental universe whose origin is not legal but philosophic-scientific, and with some unexpected reference points. First, Colizzi’s theory of knowledge was meant to reconcile the scientists’ experimental sensualism with the purity of geometric truth. In taking this approach, Colizzi referred to the ideologisti’s common conception that all ideas originate from sensations produced by external objects’ impulses on the nerve fibres up to the brain.⁴⁰ At this final point, Colizzi argued that an active principle, an ‘immaterial substance’, intervenes to convert sensations into ideas and notions (ideas or feelings that, as Locke said, would suppose a moral object).⁴¹ Nevertheless, the automatic extension of scientific truth into the moral truth remained highly doubtful. On this subject, indeed, Colizzi referred not to Lockean philosophy, but to the philosophy of his Barnabite brother, the cardinal Sigismondo Gerdil, who was the author of a whole series of works that had just been republished in fifteen volumes in Rome (1806–1809). Gerdil, a Savoyard philosopher and theologian, was an anti-Enlightenment polemicist who looked to Malebranche as his philosophical reference point and had acquired from him the idea of ‘Order’. For the Oratorian philosopher Malebranche, the immutable order of perfections – which the creatures of God partake of – is the inviolable rule by divine will, thus corresponding to the eternal law, but a law that is also natural and necessary, for all kind of spirits.⁴² The notion of the just and unjust comes, through reason, from God. For Malebranche, the comprehension of this Order is associated with a natural inclination, as an aspect of the spontaneous tendency of man to seek happiness and perfection, which is one of the constant themes of Gerdil,⁴³ and also of Colizzi.

Thus, Malebranche’s conception of Order came – through Gerdil – to Colizzi, who used it in the first place as the foundation of natural law’s rationality and immutability; even God cannot change the law of nature, being himself the source of the Order.⁴⁴ For man, this order is ‘the Norm without which he could not give to his operations any imprint of the true, just, honest. Therefore, this norm is obligatory for him; it’s a real Law’.⁴⁵ It follows that the moral being – the same one who gives origin to civil society – is such insofar as he is a rational being.

An anonymous reviewer of the first volume of Colizzi’s Saggio analitico was concerned that the author based the idea of an eternal and immutable norm on the order perceived by reason, when reason cannot elaborate anything that did not previously exist in the senses (quod prius non fuerit in sensu).⁴⁶ This could make the reader run the risk of identifying the supreme Being with nature itself as absolute intelligence, thereby paving the way for idealism or pantheism.⁴⁷ Indeed, similar doubts had already occurred to suspicious Roman censors,⁴⁸ and the inquisitor in Perugia informed Colizzi of other passages that were ‘disliked’ or considered ‘dangerous’ in Rome.⁴⁹ In the end, the ecclesiastical authorities did not forget either the ‘Jacobin’ past or the Lockean and idéologique inclinations of Colizzi.

In the following five books, the transition from the logico-metaphysical enquiry to applied natural jurisprudence unfolds in four parts, taking the following as their subjects: human actions in general; man in natural society; man in civil society; and states, with their relations.⁵⁰ The second volume thus enters into a meticulous analysis of the moral quality, and quantity, of just and unjust actions, also examining the factors – such as climate – by which actions are conditioned,⁵¹ as well as the imputability of actions in the sphere of positive law, that is, criminal law.⁵² In this first declension of natural law, the author constantly deals with the theses of Hobbes, and especially of Pufendorf, both his De jure and his De officio. Indeed, these were the authors on which both the dichotomous philosophical model of the origin of civil society and the utilitarian element of societies’ real foundation were based.⁵³ In his judgement on the main natural lawyers Colizzi does not consider Grotius, endorses Cumberland’s and Pufendorf’s systems (albeit with reservations), and criticizes Hobbes’s and Christian Thomasius’s arguments.⁵⁴

The entire third volume deals with the question of man in the state of nature, starting with the analysis of the ‘original rights of man’. These are essentially two: the right to personhood and the right to liberty. Both are dictated by the law of nature, but they are also necessarily regulated by the same law; thus – as Colizzi observed referring to Montesquieu – man cannot want what he wants, but only what he has to (want).⁵⁵ We are not yet in the political sphere, but in the pre-political one that has to be considered not as a ‘stage’ (a real transition which humanity actually passes through), but as an analytical step that Colizzi undertakes to verify the binding processes of natural law. Thus, for example, he locates equality as a ‘natural’ dimension of being human, and even if in the ‘social’ dimension – in society – there is inequality (power relations), equality will be effective there as a moral principle that induces man to recognize humanity in all persons, regardless of their condition.

This type of argument shows that the absolute rigour of the law of nature must then be consistent with actual reality, and that means that natural law is confined to the sphere of ‘the ought’. Thus, in the state of nature – in addition to the original and derivative rights here located by Colizzi’s analysis – we can already find not an idealized happiness⁵⁶ but, rather, humanity’s real nature in action, with human freedom to choose between good and evil, man’s natural tendency to live in society and form families, and with the duties that accompany rights.

Duties form the subject of the entire second chapter of the third volume,⁵⁷ a moral treatise culminating in the universal rules ‘Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you’ and ‘Do to others what you would have them do to you’.⁵⁸ This is the law of humanity and benevolence,⁵⁹ which is not only a voluntary act, but a preliminary duty – derived from the ‘essential relations’ – that requires each member of the human species to place the good of his species ahead of his own particular interest.⁶⁰ Therefore, it is not surprising to find in Colizzi’s philosophy quotations from Seneca, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Kant (even if only to criticize some of their judgements), but no mention of revelation, for the author conceives the law of nature as being inscribed in the Order. According to Colizzi, it is within this theoretical framework that moral parameters must be located, in order to let them be the basis of positive law. Indeed, Colizzi also deals with the principles of criminal law, family law and legal obligations, in this pre-political sphere. It is here, in this hypostasis of natural society, that the author compares the Order of essential relations with the variables regarding human nature itself, and the circumstances that can divert or affect human nature. Natural law is the Order, and cannot vary; by contrast, circumstances do vary, depending on individuals and on the influences they experience in civil society.

Colizzi always relies on the essential Order as his instrument of analysis, but civil society is not a philosophic-legal fiction. It is an actual organization with legal constants, and historical and political variables. Volume 4, devoted to humanity in the condition of civil society, thus marks a clear passage to political science, and consequently to other sources and texts. Colizzi advises – from the very first footnote in volume 4 – that he is reading Benjamin Constant’s 1822 commentary on Filangieri’s work on the science of legislation.⁶¹ And in fact, the normative chain that started from the essential Order had its conclusion in the civil legislation of individual states. Civil societies are formed by conferring sovereignty on one person, a few individuals, or the entire social body, in order to guarantee their own ‘security and prosperity’. The exercise of sovereignty unfolds in four parts, namely, the legislative, judicial, ‘conservative’ and executive powers, headed by separate officers, or moral bodies. The historical forms of civil society are listed in this sequence: ‘pure’ primigenial monarchy; absolute monarchy; temperate, hereditary or elective monarchy; national monarchy; aristo-popular monarchy; democracy; and federal government. In each form of government, all of the four functions mentioned above are present, and placed in relation to natural law, by both general and specific connections with empirical realities.

At this point, accompanying, if not prevailing over, the natural lawyer, the political scientist is fully aware that in contemporary civil life only ‘mixed’ forms of government exist. The subjects that compose them also provide ‘conventions or pacts to fix the functions of power and the limits on its exercise’. This set of regulations or ‘organic laws’, laid down ‘by common agreement’, is called the ‘Constitution of the State’.⁶²

Generally, we can say that for Colizzi governments operate according to natural law principles when the institutions in each of their main functions act consistently with the principles of the essential Order, the same order that presided over the formation of civil society for guaranteeing the primary aims of security and prosperity. The law of nature thus becomes an obligatory horizon for the institutional bodies, that is, the four parts of sovereign power. It is evident that when Colizzi turns from ethics and philosophy of law to applied government policies, he keeps sliding deeper and deeper into political realism, even if he continues to use the Order as the standard. In concrete terms, in addressing legislative power, and listing its functions – which override those of any other power – Colizzi lays out all the subjects of competence entrusted to the legislator, from public order and national defence to the economy. In relation to the aim of public interest, the resulting rights also carry duties. And, consistently with this reasoning, Colizzi mainly deals with public economy, which occupies about 270 pages of volume 4.

As usual, he does not name his sources, but merely says that they are ‘modern publicists’. There are, however, two footnotes that indicate important reference points for the part on government: two classics of Enlightenment political science in Germany and Austria, namely, Jakob Friedrich von Bielfeld’s Institutions politiques⁶³ and Joseph von Sonnenfels’s La scienza del buon governo.⁶⁴ Colizzi could not have missed Bielfeld’s statement that ‘while natural law tells us what is right, politics teaches us what is useful’.⁶⁵ Colizzi’s conception of natural law implied that everything which is consistent with the aim of ensuring the security and prosperity of society is useful and thus, in principle, also just. This enabled him to move into the political sphere with his own ideas about the science of government. Among these ideas, the ones that show his marked modernizing tendency (the source of the censors’ concerns) are, first, those on economics. Indeed, these ideas disclose that Colizzi relied not only on the late mercantilists, such as Bielfeld and Sonnenfels, but also on the classical economists, such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say and James Mill. In politics, Colizzi was a utilitarian and liberal, favourable to the emerging industrial economy. From his recurrent evocation of the ‘Order of essential relations’, it is clear that this order was nothing more and nothing less than the rational pursuit of public and private good through good government based on competence. Other decidedly reformist attitudes concerned, for example, censorship, which he generally approved but not for texts dealing with science, letters and the arts. Private worship of confessions other than Catholicism was also accepted. Moreover, Colizzi advocated a radical reform of education, proposing public schools, for boys and girls, and he was against Latin and in favour of courses useful to society at large.⁶⁶

The volume ends – or rather is completed in terms of political science – with an examination of state ‘constitutions’, selected as models of the main forms of government. Colizzi starts out by making three disclaimers: he does not wish to discuss the quality of individual forms of government; he restricts his sources to a few authors, such as Hobbes, Constant’s commentary on Filangieri, and Destutt de Tracy’s commentary on Montesquieu, while the others are collectively mentioned simply as ‘modern publicists’. Regarding each form of government, Colizzi chooses to describe the legal system of some contemporary states: for explaining absolute monarchy he selects Denmark; for national monarchy, Sweden; for aristo-popular monarchy, the United Kingdom and France; for representative democracy, the constitution of Pennsylvania;⁶⁷ and for the federal state, the systems of the United States and the German Confederation.⁶⁸

Volume 5 turns to the other perspective of post-revolutionary political science: the rights of man and of the citizen. Are they inalienable? Certainly they are, because according to natural law they are a property of each person as a human being; but in society, they can only partly be enjoyed: by choosing to enter into the civil condition, man agrees to limit his liberty (submitting himself to laws) and his equality (submitting himself to government and accepting social ranks, inevitably connected with the different functions of the social Order), even though man never renounces natural equality, which is therefore protected by law. It is clear that here Colizzi moved far away from political Jacobinism.

The last volume is devoted to the law of nations, distinguishing an ‘internal’ law of nations (i.e., public law) from an ‘external’ law of nations (i.e., international relations). In the internal law of nations, we find indications concerning the reciprocal rights and duties of sovereign and subjects, which had been addressed by an almost endless political literature. Nevertheless, in the internal law of nations, the reference to natural law still retained its acknowledged function of judging the state’s practical choices (especially territorial) to be licit or illicit. With regard to the external law of nations, the intention of applying the Order theory to relations among states, considering them as individuals in the state of nature, would have been useless because purely formal.⁶⁹ However, Colizzi did not intend to forsake the continuity between morality, natural law and the law of nations. Thus, for example, in Martens’s introduction to his Précis du Droit des gens moderne de l’Europe (one of the main sources for Colizzi), he finds the claim that each state as a moral person – and also each of its members as a man – retains a ‘natural’ relation to foreigners, other communities, or peoples; therefore, natural law can apply to any kind of international relations, except to those stated in individual states’ agreements.⁷⁰ That a common legal sphere was in point of fact born as a shared form of civilization did not, however, mean that Europe was to be thought of as a single civil society, bound by a positive and universal ius gentium.⁷¹ In the law of nations, universal principles of humanity apply alongside de facto conventions, customs, treaties and international practices, which have to be considered through states’ actual behaviours. The specialized literature and the publication of treaties (and collections of them) had been profuse in the late eighteenth century,⁷² but to access them in extenso was not possible for an author confined in remote Perugia. Still, the volume does contain many references to recent specialized works by Bielfeld, Martens, Lampredi, Klüber, Schmalz and Vattel.⁷³ Colizzi chose the best authors available in Italian or French and drew inspiration from them in treating specific problems on which he thought they had valuable insights to offer (neutrality, commerce, navigation, rankings and embassies), even if he followed his own educational scheme.

The journey that started out from an abstract philosophy of natural law and which was not always well received by censors and critics thus reached its end station in the practical problems of a world that was rapidly changing, and full of revolutionary ferment. The work’s fortune was certainly compromised by its size, which made it unsuitable as a textbook (even though a 144-page extract was published in 1836).⁷⁴ Colizzi’s work can still be found in the main Umbrian libraries and in many Italian law libraries, but it does not seem to have had a noteworthy international echo. While Giulio Bartolini did recently include Colizzi among those who had had an international influence, in connection with the relationship between the local/national contexts and international legal rules and doctrines, that was largely because his work was done in a place and at a time that saw important political events.⁷⁵

4 Conclusion: From the 1848 Revolution to Italian Unification

As a highly esteemed professor in Perugia,⁷⁶ Colizzi had students who would approach the Risorgimento uprising with serious commitment. One of his students, Emilio Barbanera, was appointed to the chair in the law of nature and of nations in 1847, when the course was reopened during the political phase that led to the new Roman Republic. Although we do not have his writings, we must suppose him to have been much more involved in political life than in teaching. Barbanera had been among the organizers in Perugia behind the Neo-Guelphist movement to unify Italy as a monarchy under the pope,⁷⁷ but later, as a committed exponent of the Perugian popular circle, he clearly supported the ending of the clerical government and was incriminated for an article published in the Osservatore del Trasimeno.⁷⁸ Obviously, with the third Restoration, he could no longer hold the chair. This time, the Roman Congregation decided not to abolish the course, but to assign it to trusted people: thus, for the 1853 course the position was given to the Servite friar Bonfiglio Mura.⁷⁹ He held the chair until Unification (1861), with the task of restoring anti-modern natural law, and so to demolish the heritage of his predecessors, despite their moderation. In his inaugural lecture in 1853,⁸⁰ Mura singled out Martin Luther, Rousseau, Pufendorf, Thomasius and Burlamaqui as the thinkers responsible for separating natural law from theology, and for leaving humanity prey to utilitarianism and unrestrained freedom. He then listed Helvétius, d’Holbach, Bentham, Genovesi, Melchiorre Gioia and Gian Domenico Romagnosi as basically followers of Epicurus’s ‘abject morality’.⁸¹ There is an explicit reference to Colizzi’s theses, most significantly the thesis that excluded revelation as the direct source of natural law and placed it in the ‘order’, that is, in the universal reason instilled by God in man. To Mura, this seemed to be the typical error of unbelievers, of many Protestants and of those ‘modernizing Catholics who consider it necessary entirely to exclude Revelation when treating of reason’.⁸² So, in addition to Protestants and the ‘friends of constitutions’, the ‘modernizing Catholics’ also seemed to the theologian of intransigence, Bonfiglio Mura, a great danger to the education of young people.

The cycle of Perugian natural law theory can thus be considered to have been concluded by mid-century, having played a very significant role in the troubled and confused time that passed between two revolutions, a time that had essentially both affected and tested the intrinsic political nature of natural law.